YOUR CART

Book of Us Project

Intro

The Book of Us is a project inspired by last year's project which was also called "Book of Us". All of my classmates and myself wrote a nonfiction short story, or article, that was important to us, and we made all of the articles into one whole book. This project is based on the facts that every great writing is written about something that the writer is passionate about, also that every great writing has a lot of rewriting, critique, and most of all editing, and finally that every great writer is a great writer by learning from other great writers. In this project we hoped to learn many things, somethings are that we would learn to turn something we are passionate about into a really good piece of writing, and that we learn many grammatical rules.

Real World Writing Purposes

The real world writing purposes fit helped us in our project because it gave us an example of what we would write at first. It gave us an idea of what would be a good thing to write about. Since we were given such a big variety of what we could write in our piece, this helped us put our ideas down in groups and choose the one we would like to write about most.

1 Topic = 18 Topic Sheet

We got all the real world writing purposes and transformed it into a topic in which we wanted to write about. I chose to write about my family, because it's something that i feel I am very passionate about. At first it was kind of difficult filling this out, because I couldn't find anything to write about, but after a while, I started coming up with some topics. I went for the purpose Express and Reflect, and decided to write about my sister's story when my mom was pregnant with her, and how she affects my life every day.

Five Minute Quick Write

In this quick write we had 5 minutes to write something in each purpose. Since we only had 3 minutes we wrote anything that came into our head relating to the topic we were writing for that purpose.

Down Draft

As I reread my down draft, i notice a lot of grammar errors. I notice that I made many changes in my last draft. Also I notice that I was missing a lot of information that would make my writing more interesting, for example, like how my parents felt throughout the pregnancy, and I'm glad that I added that in my last draft.

Graphic Organizers

Most of the graphic organizers helped me with my writing piece except for the sensory image one, because since I wasn't writing about a certain memory, I couldn't really write anything on that graphic organizer, even though I would have liked more sensory image on my writing piece, but I ended up only putting a memory I have with my sister in the organizer. Something that could happen next time this project happens, is to only give the sensory image worksheet to people who need it. A organizer that helped me a lot was the opening lines graphic organizer, because it helped me come up with a strong opening line for my writing piece.

Feedback & Critique

The critique that I thought was most useful was the scissors critique, because I thought was very helpful how people would say what to take of, and what to add in our writing piece. The critique that I thought was less useful, was the author - led critique, because there were some people that didn't know what they needed help on, and it was just difficult for the critique to look for whatever they needed. A way you could make the author led critique better is to make the part that you have to write something specific that you need help on optional. I also got helpful feedback from Dr. P on interviewing my mom, that made my piece stronger and more interesting by adding what my mother thought about the whole thing.

Final Draft

Something that i am really proud of in this writing piece is how I could write down something I care very much about, and how I wrote down exactly how my mother felt through out my sister's pregnancy. Something that i would've really like to have added was sensory image, I feel that the piece could have been more vivid if I would have been more descriptive on the sensory imaging.

Reflection

At first when I barely started the project I wanted to write about tennis, but I felt that it would've been a little hard to write about it, so i decided to write about my family. AT first I just wanted to write about how having a little sister affects my life, but then i remembered about the story when my mom was pregnant with her, and I felt that it fit perfectly with what I was writing. After I had written what I thought was a good written piece, I got critique from Dr. P and I realized it still needed a lot of work, like the interview with my mom and dad, and small things like that. There is a big difference from my first draft to my last, in my last there is a lot more about how my mom felt, and I am more descriptive on some memories my mom had when she was pregnant. Something I did in this project that I plan to do on others is that I interviewed my mom, and that helped my piece a lot, so in the future if I am writing about someone, or something, I would like to interview someone related to what I am writing about. Something I would change in my piece right now would be to ad more sensory image.